Fashion Blogs

How What Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time Can Ruin Your Life

So many things can go wrong in plastic surgery that you have to wonder why a normal healthy person would put themselves through it. Plastic surgeons’ websites will tell you that, if you are healthy to begin with, meet their psych requirements, and follow post-op recovery guidelines that major complications will be rare. B y major complications we’re talking about permanent nerve damage, tissue necrosis (tissue death) keloid scarring, infection, bleeding and surgical wounds not closing and healing properly. All of these situations may be worst-case scenario, but there are a whole bunch of other things that can, and do go wrong in the aftermath of plastic surgery. Here’s a list of a few:

The Sag

Though lots of women get breast implants during their late teen years or early twenties just to get bigger boobs, there are huge numbers of women who go under the knife to correct age-based or post-breastfeeding sag. The ironic thing is that in some cases the implants themselves end up doing more sag damage than ever imagined. The fact is, we all age. And regardless of how great the original implants looked, over time even they will sag with the rest of the skin - a basic fact of gravity! Nice, largish breast implant filled with 400cc’s of silicon weight just under a pound each, and your chest muscles and skin will have to lug that around forever, causing, unavoidably, the sag you tried to run from in the first place. 

The Scar

Surgeons are getting more and more adept at hiding plastic surgery scars near the ears, in the armpits and, for tummy tucks, nestled as close to the pubic region as possible. But excess scar tissues, or keloids, do happen and though fairly rare in caucasians, you wouldn’t know if you had a tendency toward it until faced with post-op surgical wounds. In addition, skin is a living, changing, growing, sagging stuff and scars that might be hidden today could easily settle over time into a more exposed position. Even how you use the muscles under your skin (for example, do you grin a lot or have a natural tendency to scowl, or are you into body building or extreme dieting?) can affect where your scar actually ends up over time. 

The Senselessness

Not only is nerve damage a potential risk in plastic surgery, but numbness as well. As a matter of fact, it is far more common than most people like to admit. Women with huge, beautiful new breasts often don’t want to admit that they have no sensation in their nipples anymore, which is or course ironic since so often the augmentation is intended to make the woman feel more sexy. Instead, one of their major erogenous zones becomes dead territory. This can also happen to lips post Botox injection. Now you've got kissables, but you can’t even control them enough to drink properly. In most cases Botox wears off, but not always. And for for too many women, the feeling they lose after a boob job just never returns.

The Seeping

This is actually one of the more horrible scenarios to come up in the past year. Hundreds of thousands of European women, believing their plastic surgeons were looking out for their best interest, were augmented with implants that were not only knowingly filled with industrial grade silicon by the manufacturer, but that were virtually guaranteed to eventually leak as well. Silicon leakage happens slowly over time and can cause pain, soreness, swelling related to infection. Even though saline is a much safer alternative, leakage from either type of filler will of course deflate the breast, leaving you with an empty plastic bag under your once-gorgeous boob. Not very glamorous, and dangerous too.

The Stretch

Finally, there’s the awful Hollywood Stretch, and the accompanying weird lumpiness and general deformity of once-natural features. Fattened-up cheek pads, eyebrow lifts, skin tucks, eyelid reductions, lip enhancements, jowl removal, chin reshaping and the ubiquitous nose job have become sick obsessions in celebrity circles. Aside from all the real-time things that can go awry during surgery and recovery, it’s the very natural aging process that causes the ultimate damage, reconfiguring once surgically-set-and-perfected faces into weird caricatures of their youthful selves. Malpractice suits and cosmetic surgery claims are on the rise as surgeons come up with more and more creative ways to meet the rising demand for “beauty” enhancements.

Though the majority of plastic surgeons are reputable, there are money-hungry sleazes and quacks out there who can do irreparable damage to you. Before you end up regretting it and filing a cosmetic surgery claim of your own, be sure to do some serious research!

This is a guest post by Liz Conaty.  Concerned for those with a Cosmetic Surgery Claim, Liz urges people who feel victimized to explore their options.